Junior Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

I'm a 2023 new graduate working at a mid-sized software company that operates remotely. The company has a rotation program for new graduates, and my first rotation was with the backend team. After six months, I moved to the mobile team, and in another three months, I must decide whether to stay with the mobile team or return to the backend team.

Both teams have positive cultures, work-life balance, teammates, and managers. However, it seems the mobile team's manager faces more pressure from the leadership. The work I've done on both teams has been interesting, although the mobile projects were more challenging. This has forced me to think more about structure and patterns when writing code. It's clear the mobile team needs more engineers, while the backend team receives a steady influx of new graduates each year.

There were noticeable differences in the onboarding processes of each team. In the backend team, my tasks were intentionally organized, starting with simple tasks like deleting a few lines of code and gradually moving to small projects with pre-written design documents.

The mobile team gave me a series of official tutorials for the first two months. The tasks varied greatly in difficulty—some incredibly challenging and others relatively easy. I understand the difference, as the backend teams have more experience with new graduates, while the mobile team typically hires experienced engineers directly.

My decision pivots on whether I should pursue a career as a backend or mobile engineer. I am grateful for the rotation opportunity my company has provided, but I'm unsure about the next steps. What factors should I consider when making this decision? What kind of question should I ask my managers or help I can get from them for making a better decision?

I work on a product that runs on a variety of architectures, with code split across many GitHub repositories. We have a complicated build process. When making changes, I often struggle to find a way to run those changes efficiently (i.e. outside of the CI process). This is made worse when I need to make changes that also change the build process or need to run debugging tools like GDB.

When I onboarded, I was told that everyone has their own setup by people who've been on the team since its inception. It seems like people newer than myself have figured it out, even with how messy and changing everything is. However, I've been here for over a year and the team tends to work quite independently. Occasionally, folks will be quite helpful for a point or two, but generally everyone's stretched a bit thin and tends to focus on their tickets. My manager has also rebuffed any requests for collaboration or mentorship since I started, saying that I'm expected to be independent to show I'm ready for the next level. He did say I could that I could try to change the team's culture to be more collaborative if I wanted to take initiative, but that's not what's expected of a software engineer, especially if I want to do well and get promoted.

This question may be more about how to correctly get answers answered when you're no longer new, but I also feel that building (CMake, Docker, environment setup, package management, etc.) is slowing me down. Are there good processes for getting more efficient at building components/systems and unblocking yourself faster?

If I'm interested in exploring a new area in my company, say I want to do back end development and I'm currently an SRE, but I don't have any real experience in backend development, do you have some suggestions on how I can explore this and possibly switch over to being a backend engineer?

Like, if I wanted to take on new tasks in backend, for instance - how would I go about identifying opportunities and/or tasks in that area if I don't have such tasks in my current team?

I'm an sde 1 at Amazon and been working there for 2 years. I have changed multiple teams during that time unfortunately. In every team, I have struggled with getting noticed by the team.

I have observed that the best performers talk about active tickets even when they are not on call. How do I balance between my task and working on extra tickets to get noticed?

What else can I do to get noticed apart from my own task and high sev tickets?

I'm graduating with my MS this Dec looking for MLE/Data Science roles. I have not had any professional work experience (outside of internships/part time TA)

When considering salary, I often look at paybands by SWE level since there's just more entries/data for them.

Is it fair to expect the pay equivalent of 2 YoE SWE for an entry level MLE/DS role with a Masters?

tbh it's totally fine if not, I just want to make sure I'm not totally lowballing myself when discussing salary.

With a recent, completely unexpected reorg, the product my team owns has effectively been cancelled and will be sunsetted. The company is trying to figure out new scope for my team, but in the meantime, I don't really have stuff to work on. Here are my questions:

1. Is having 1-2 months of downtime like this okay for my job and career?
2. What can I do in the meantime to be productive? I've mainly just been doing auxiliary things like reading documentation.

I've raised this concern to manager in almost every 1-1 once even in front of Director of Eng that I'm interested in more roles and responsibilities. Cuz I was not a fresher even when I joined the current company at entry level and now that I've done decent work too at current company.

But manager fails to give me a path/timeline of when will I be entrusted with some impactful work.

He criticises in public, and has a favourite too who uses this to influence the manager against others.

Manager also wants every small thing to be done his way and he presents the whole thing as learning opportunity for me.

If junior engineers are not supposed to do anything on their own then why are they even hired as engineers?

Should I look for new opportunities? Or how can I take away most from the current situation?

They recently rolled out the Booking Career Framework, creating itemized lists on the expectations for each level, so I know what it takes to get promoted. I'm 70% - 80% that I'll get it in the next performance review cycle, but I have some concerns.

My main concern is that Booking doesn't have a lot of space to grow, evident by the fact that I spend ~50% of my time on the company's migration effort to move from Perl to Java. The effort for this started in 2014 and is around 30% done. It's not a super high company priority according to my manager, but my team spends a lot of time on it, which worries my prospects about finding scope with better business impact.

On the flip side, I had Java experience coming into Booking, so I am well-equipped for this migration work. For example, I was able to solve a deep image loading issue recently that required a strong understanding of default Perl behavior.

I'm pushing for the E4 promotion in the next PSC cycle, and I've gotten some feedback that I could shore up my people axis contribution. Given that, I was wondering how important people is for this promo and how I can get points on this axis as a growing E3. People axis contribution seems harder given the hiring freezes (e.g. it's harder to be a bootcamp mentor) and the fact that the main intern season is over.

Hi Taro. When choosing a team, we also have to choose their specialization and tools. If the specialization is niche and the team uses exclusively internal tools I won't gain any transferable skills. I got laid off from AWS and I am realizing that I have little transferable skills. I used mostly internal tools. Believe it or not, many AWS teams do not use AWS extensively.

How can I choose a team or focus area for transferable skills? I was considering pivoting into Android and IOS development because I see many job openings for these.

Background:

I interned on my current team last summer and returned full-time at the beginning of this year. I've been performing well and have a great relationship with my co-workers, manager, and skip manager.

However, I'm not satisfied with the level of engineering in the org as a whole. Specifically, our service does not operate at a high scale and thus the engineering constraints are very relaxed. It feels like we can get away with making poor decisions and I often think that I am not learning good engineering principles by being here. It also feels like my peers are not that ambitious or passionate about engineering which makes me feel like I don't fit in at times. As a result, I'm looking to change teams even though I am only ~6.5 months into my career.

I recently did an internal loop with another team that does very interesting work with high-scale and low-latency services. The interviews went well and I was given the transfer offer. I think my mind is mostly made up on joining the new team, but just wanted to ping-pong my situation with the Taro community as a sanity check on whether I am making the right choice.

I'm aware that switching teams is essentially a "soft reset" on my promo timeline. I have a lot of substantial work artifacts from my current team such as: code reviews for important feature work and docs that contributed heavily to the service we just launched.

I'm okay with taking a hit to my promo timeline because in my mind, if I zoom out and view my career as a 30-40 year span, it won't really matter whether I got promoted from new grad engineer in 1.5 years or 2.5 years.

What does the Taro community think of my situation? Am I thinking about this in the right way? I tried to keep some details vague as to not speak too negatively on my current team in a public forum. But I'm happy to provide more details to the best of my ability!

I feel like it's more joyful to positively impact the life of others vs. only getting a really high title/pay. The latter also has high stress, and I don’t want work to be everything. I believe that teaching is a way to improve communication skills and software engineering skills overall, and I would like to mentor more junior engineers than myself at work. Another option I'm considering is going back to my bootcamp App Academy bootcamp to teach others how to code.

Hi! I have an interview with the company that laid me off some months back. The manager who reached out to me for the role claimed that two people who work on this team already know me, so the idea would be to hire me on a contract, then get to work early since I know the system already, and get some quality work done fast. The manager and I have a pre-existing relationship: he was consistently checking in on how I was doing as I was in the process of officially leaving. This manager said he wanted to help me out, and that this role looked "perfect" for me. Given the market these days, I jumped at the idea.

There's one really strange look to this. The recruiter told me from the jump that they're interviewing other people with 3 to 5 years of experience. Although I appreciate the honesty, you can imagine I'm pissed about having to fight other people for the job I deserve to have back (which the manager said I look "perfect" for), but I'm not going to voice that to the company because I'd look arrogant. This recruiter I was speaking with last Friday also said in an email "The interview panel will be mixed up a bit to try and be as unbiased as possible. They are excited to speak with you." Makes sense, because another thing in context here is that I do know quite a few people in that company.

I got the name of who's interviewing me yesterday. I found the person on LinkedIn, and was very perplexed to see that it's some financial consultant person within the company. Someone with a very far from tech background, performing an hour long technical interview? Just ONE person, on top of that. I've seen interviews there where 3 people are grilling the interviewee.

I have no idea what's going on. But I have 3 ideas. Firstly, maybe they're thinking "let's just give you the job and have a random interview you". That'd be nice, but I don't think it'll be that easy, so the second idea is they might be finding a technical interviewer, so they can run a strategy of "behavior cop/tech cop". Or, the last idea: they don't care and are gonna blow me off. Whatever happens, the company I'm interviewing for is opening up a LOT of software engineer spots in my area, so they're gonna try to find me a new position.

I've asked multiple of my friends at the company what this could mean, but no one knows. I'll update this question when I receive an answer, but I wanted to gauge what y'all thought here.

Thanks.

I just got my first project, and I have no idea where to start from and I have 2 weeks to complete the project. I have code pointers. How do I understand the codebase better to even start my project? I need the best actionable advice I can get right now

I'm in my last semester of my master's program. One of my professors asked me if I was interested in pursuing PhD. I like to write code and learn to build software rather than learning from theory. I like the idea of research, and I know if I pursue PhD focusing on ML, I will be able to learn a lot and break into the ML/AI industry much easier than my current state. I'm only worried about not being able to earn substantially for the next 4-5 years until I complete the PhD and join the industry. Given the current state of IT market, and also being an international student who eventually wants to remain in the US, I feel, PhD might be the right choice. Can someone help me evaluate the pros and cons.

Edit:
Some additional context that I think I should have mentioned. I love the idea of pursuing PhD. I have always liked research work. I'm not considering it only as an alternative. I just don't like the idea of a prolonged study while not able to earn as much during the same period.

The main question that I am trying to answer is: Will a PhD help me in the long run? How valuable is it compared to having work experience during the same time?

Hi I was wondering whether you know where I could find just entrepreneurial people that try to solve a problem with AI and maybe make a business out of it? I would be interested in working on a project from some entrepreneurial person that tries to solve a problem with AI. I would like to do my own project, since now is the time to build stuff with AI maybe using ChatGPT API. However, I am very extroverted so I can't do my own project - I don't have the motivation, so it's hard to build that way.

Or are these folks mostly in Silicon Valley?

I kind of unexpectedly got a new grad swe interview at Meta. I know there are already discussions on Taro about Meta interview, but I wanted to seek advice on my specific situation.

I am sort of new to Leetcode. I mostly interned at startups before so LC wasn't the focus (ik I still should have done LC - my bad). So here are few questions I have:

1. How much can I delay the interview? I am thinking doing it with 4 week breaks - the first round after 4 weeks from today, next round after another 4 weeks, and so on. Is that ok?

2. How many hours should i dedicate per day to leetcode, to get good at it FAST? Asking because I am also a full-time student so I am willing to sacrifice my grades if it requires putting more time into leetcode.

3. What are the HIGHEST bang for buck activities I can do? Time is extremely limited so I want to make sure I am spending it right.

FYI - I do have access to algomonster () - I am thinking of doing my LC prep there cause it's pattern based + has AI coach.

I would really appreciate some advice here. Have never interviewed for a FAANG so this opportunity means a lot. Thanks!!

(Also if you know of good resources, suggest them too! I am willing to invest in resources/mentors.)

I'm currently happily employed and I want to cultivate a strong network so that when I need a new job in the future, I am not struggling

I have watched the Taro course on referrals and cold emailing, but my issues is that I went to a small no-name state school and I don't know that many alumni. Also work at a 5-10 person YC backed startup so I don't interact with many people at my job

I understand networking is a long term game, but I feel stuck trying to build deeper relationships and especially trying to level up

I'd love something actionable on how I can add value to people and network that doesn't rely on my job/college

I'd also love to know how to leverage the fact that I work at a YC backed company to network with other YC backed startups?

Everyone wants to work at a YC backed company so I worry that the eng leads/founders get tons of spam email, so how can I stand out -- especially if they are a B2B company where I cant use their product and offer feedback or if they're more mature (series A/B) and I don't really have a lot of feedback

Background : I'm a new-grad junior engineer, recently joined the company around 3 months ago, so still pretty early in my career. I'm currently working on an assigned project which I own and believe it has impact.

Details : My manager recently recommended I take on a quarter-long project in parallel to my current project (as we're short on bandwidth), which I don't feel very passionate about and don't see much impact in it. My understanding is that the work for that project will be on & off while my main focus will still be on my original project

Question : It is good to take on additional responsibility, as long as I have the bandwidth for it, I agree. I'm just not sure if this new project would be beneficial or is the best thing to work on.

How can I handle this situation ? Should I be concerned too much about the project's impact (as opposed to taking more responsibility), especially since I'm still early on in my role / career ?

I currently have 2-3 side projects that are OK. They had some usage, shows my skills in building non trivial software.

But it feels like if a project doesn't have 10k users then its pointless in this market and I feel hesitant to do a project because I have this go big or go home mentality

Also 10k users feels like such a massive goal and if im not able to hit it then all the hours spent is wasted. There's also no gaurantee that the project will ever hit 10k users. Plus getting to 10k users is not just a function of building good software its also basically going to need you to be a part time salesperson/marketer which feels annoying/I dont enjoy it

My main motivation to build a project is to get more interviews

I have been working at my current company for about a year. I am a junior engineer on a team with mostly senior engineers. My team trusts me to execute independently and I'm pretty confident in my ability to get things done. I want more ownership and I would like to bring value to the team outside of assigned tasks/projects. How would you approach identifying opportunities here?

I know that it's in the company's best interest to lowball you: Is there a way to get around this without burning bridges? I'm wary of doing something like getting a counteroffer, since that feels very aggressive.

Adding on to this: Even though we're a startup, we do have a fairly defined career matrix. We have levels (junior, intermediate, senior, etc) and a performance review every 6 months where levels are reassessed and promotions/raise are given where appropriate. So that's a path that can be taken.

For background, I’m self-taught and got my first software dev role less than 2 years ago. I want a new job because this job isn't providing me with the skills needed to keep up with the industry/job market, but in part because I don't have those in demand skills I'm struggling to get interviews. At my current job, I was able to negotiate a large pay raise and because of that, for the first time in my life I’m not anxious about finances, so I'm naturally pretty cautious about taking a pay cut.

I code a lot outside of work, so I have skills/knowledge of areas outside of what I do at work, however, it seems most recruiters only value commercial experience with a given tech stack or field.

Is it a smart move to sort of ‘take a step back’ in order to get different commercial experience? Or should I just keep grinding and looking for Jr. roles with comparable salaries?

Hello I wanted to get some advice. I noticed I can make it to the recruiter, but I keep failing when it goes to the hiring manger side. I'm not interviewing with any engineers - Any ideas on how I can improve this?